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Saturday, October 4, 2008

...about $30's worth of them, from Granville Island in Vancouver. We splurged. And the nice shrimp lady gave us some extra, and some just-in candied salmon as a present.

They were beautiful shrimp. I don't remember exactly how I prepared them, after cleaning them and laying them in neat rows in a long pyrex dish. I was going to broil them, turning them just once. Rosemary, garlic, Vermouth and small tomatoes were involved.

When the time came to turn them, I opened the oven and pulled out the rack they were sitting on. Instead of stopping where it should've the rack and its passengers in their scorching-hot conveyance, fresh from 500'F, shot towards me and across the kitchen, flinging shrimp left and right.

I screamed. It was a good time to scream.

Vince rushed in, assessed damage to my feet and person (none) and then started to scoop shrimp from the floor. We're eating these shrimp, I muttered. Yes we are, he affirmed.

Back they went into their pyrex. It was a clean floor. Whatever.

When they were done I took the pink crustaceans out of their dish and put them in a bowl while I deglazed the pyrex on the stove with some Vermouth (yes, it's all coming back to me now). I had just poured the rich, creamy sauce over them and placed the pyrex back onto the hot plate when

BAM! Ringing ears and shellshock...

Vince rushed back in.

Pyrex, shards of glass everywhere.

Um.

I exploded the dish, I said. Unnecessarily.

Hm.

We started to pick up slivers of sharp glass from the floor. And the stove. Then we considered the shrimp, sitting 6" away from ground zero. They look fine, I said.

Hm, said my husband. He disappeared and returned with a headlamp. He might not have All Clad but he has headlamps. We inspected them inch by inch. I see nothing: we're eating them, I said doggedly.

Hm, said Vince. Then something glittered on a shrimp shell. A minute piece of glass.

Hm, said Vince.

I dredged some shrimp up from the bottom of the bowl, where they would have been sheltered from the blast, and put them on my plate. I put some on his plate. We went to the table and had a slug of cold white wine. You could have heard a pin drop. I peeled and ate a shrimp, and it tasted really good. Vince looked about as unhappy as I have ever seen him look, put one in his mouth and chewed.

Crunch.

Quietly I took them back to the kitchen and binned them.

You know how long it takes for take-out pizza to arrive in Vancouver?

One Hour!!!!

While I recovered at the computer Vince sent a snack out from the kitchen, temporarily off limits to my person. Some pate and a cornichon, from our favourite purveyor and duck prosciutto-provider on Granville Island.

We ate the very passable pizza (margharita with mushrooms and anchovies) and watched Nemo again.

Afterwards in the street, she looks around the neighborhood. "Yes, it is certified now."

She refers to a phenomenon of moviegoing which I have called certification. Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere."

The Moviegoer, Walker Percy

The garden paths were lit by coloured lamps, as is the custom in Italy, and the supper table was laden with candles and flowers, as is the custom in all countries where they understand how to dress a table, which when properly done is the rarest of all luxuries.

Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts - just mere thoughts - are as powerful as electric batteries, as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison.

Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

George Eliot, Middlemarch

(Mrs Cadwallader to Dorothea)

"I know it's a great temptation to go mad, but don't go in for it, you wouldn't like it."

George Eliot, Middlemarch

"A is for dining Alone...and so am I, if a choice must be made between most people I know and myself. This misanthropic attitude is one I am not proud of, but it is firmly there, based on my ever-increasing conviction that sharing food with another human being is an act that should not be indulged in lightly."

MFK Fisher, The Art of Eating

What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran with them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

I was planning on writing about a woman for 50 years. I will never be competent enough to do so, but at some point you have to try.

Richard Chaston (1620-1695). Chaston wrote that men and fairies both contain within them a faculty of reason and a faculty of magic. In men reason is strong and magic is weak. With fairies it is the other way round: magic comes very naturally to them, but by human standards they are barely sane.

Susanna Clark, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?